News for and about the Health 2.0 Community

Today, we present another HxRsneak peak! Adam Connor works at Mad*Pow to ensure that customers reach great design solutions, with a better design education and better collaboration.

What is your burning mission in health and why?

AC: I guess I have two. First, I want to help teams, whether they be patients, doctors, analysts, developers, whomever work better together to improve patients lives. I believe that collaboration is critical, but it takes a lot more understanding and action than just putting people together on a team and expecting them to make something. Second, I want to help bring basic, compassionate, empathic human-to-human interaction back to healthcare and avoid the industry becoming so enamored with technology that patients become database records, or usernames that log into apps and websites. Technology is great, used as an assistive tool it can add both power and speed to interactions, but nothing, nothing is superior to meaningful human interaction, especially when it comes to a person’s health.

What is your patient story?

AC: I was diagnosed with a rare, chronic condition when I was five. Given how relatively little is known about the condition, I’ve gone through a wide variety of treatments and dealt with the relative successes and failures of each. Over the long view of that time, I’ve had great experiences and healthcare, and some that we’re so mind-blowingly absurd it leaves you to question wether anyone knows what they’re doing. In my experience these absurdities tend to happen between things, between events, for example transitions of information from one doctor to another. These situations leave patients feeling helpless and hopeless. Getting teams to think through these kinds of challenges is part of what drives my interest in designing for healthcare.

Why should people come to your session?

AC: Chances are you’ve worked as part of a team. And it’s more than likely you’re going to have to again in the future. The success of your projects and of your organization rely on teams being able to work together. Taking a step back and understanding the challenges that teams face so that you can proactively address them means better ideas, better progress and happier team members. And I’m pretty sure that those are all good things.